


The Ruins of Ostagar

by Roses



Category: Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Dark, F/M, Magic, POV First Person, Present Tense, Wordcount: Over 1.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-17
Updated: 2010-10-17
Packaged: 2017-10-12 17:59:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/127534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Roses/pseuds/Roses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>"Mage and templar, together. One to walk the path, and one to watch her step. It is as it has always been."</i></p><p>After the events of Dragon Age: Origins, Neria and Alistair must find some way to re-build the Order from what little knowledge is left. It's a painful process for everyone, not least the apprentices that they choose to put through the ritual of the Joining.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Ruins of Ostagar

The ruins of Ostagar stretch up against the winter sky and scratch against the clouds. The snow stopped falling about an hour ago, but it's still piled high into the windshadow of the broken walls In the darkling, it almost seems to glow with its own, inner light. Here and there, the fire or our footsteps have swept almost all of it away, and the earth beneath is black.

Not the black of rich and fertile soil, the black of a dead land.

The wind comes through the ruins: Singing a lament between the jagged towers where the sound of bells once echoed through the winter nights--calling to the people lost out in the darkness and the cold.

Standing before the censer, my fingers are almost as white as the snow. The firelight paints a perfect circle of amber light onto this monochrome world: Seeping out over the black earth towards the bone-white snow, and splashing up against the gunmetal greyness of the ruin.

I know that Alistair is out there--standing somewhere in the shadow of this ancient, ruined place. I do not see him with my eyes, but with my mind. The way the firelight catches in his hair and turns it from blonde to ember-red. The tissue-paper-thin layer of frost that's forming on his armour, turning the bright metal into stormcloud grey. I can see the way he stands, arms crossed, favouring his right leg, and watches me as I shrug off my cloak and come before the fire.

I cannot feel the cold. I can only feel his eyes on me. His eyes, and the eyes of our apprentice. The eyes of the frightened creature we have taken in as our own flesh. The one we hope shall become like us.

 _This time_ , I think for Alistair, because I cannot say it. _This time, perhaps it will be different. This time, I shall make it work. I promise._

The incense in the censer is filling the winter air with fragrant smoke. Frankincense and amber. The night is coming—the sky darkening through shades of grey (through cloud, and smoke, and stone) towards the inevitable blackness. Somewhere behind those clouds, the moon is burning full and bright. I can feel the coming night against the bare skin of my shoulders.

There is a break up in the evening cloud, and the moonlight comes through like a headache in the fleecy sky. The light burns through a few forgotten fragments of stained glass, but the colours that they cast upon the ground are not what they should be. They are inverted, as though the glass has created a negative image of itself upon the ground.

 _This was a magical place_ , I remind myself. _Long before it was a cursed one._

My apprentice shivers before me. I can taste his fear in that winter air and can almost hear his breathing—somewhere behind the requiem the wind makes of the ruins and the sound of templar armour as, somewhere in the shadows, Alistair shifts his weight onto the other foot… and waits.

He watches like a raven.

 _Watches like my silent shadow._

Mage and templar, together. One to walk the path, and one to watch her step.

It is now as it should be.

It is as it has always been.

I stand before the fire, and take the Joining cup up in both hands. Inside, the blood is so dark that it's almost black. I raise that cup towards the moon. I close my eyes, and whisper a few words underneath my breath. I'm sure that the other Wardens never prayed to elven gods before, but they are all dead now. Now, it is down to he and I to do exactly what we must.

The wind is pulling at my robes as I set the chalice down and draw the dagger across my forearm. In the moonlight, I can see the cross-hatching of old scars from a dozen failed Joinings. Each one of those old scars has a name attached to it. A name written in my flesh forever.

That is my burden. I must bear it.

"Come," I tell my apprentice.

And he comes. He comes to me obediently, as though he were following a thread that draws him there. I take his hands in mine as the blood runs down my arm and binds the two of us together. I rest my cheek against his shoulder, and I squeeze his bloodied hands in mine.

"Be strong," I say. "It will all be over soon."

I hold my arms over the cup, and let my own blood fall down into it. Let it mix with the blood of the darkness, the blood of the demon, and the silver-blue blood of the mountains that we call lyrium. The lifeblood of everything. The fabric of magic itself.

My apprentice kneels before me, like an acolyte that has come into the presence of something sacred--something holy. I lift the chalice from the blackened earth, and press to his lips.

"Now drink," I say.

And he does.

I see his body shudder, watch him come onto his hands and knees. I watch him cough and gag and struggle on the blood. I watch. And, somewhere out there in the darkness of the ruins, I know that Alistair is watching, too.

The apprentice at my feet stops choking, and starts to cry: Great, wracking sobs that seem to tear at his insides. Those sobs become a snarl… a howl… a howl that joins with the anger of the winter wind. That seems to want to rend the world in two.

He comes for me, and the chalice falls out of my hands.

Blood trickles through the snow, and my apprentice strikes me like a mountain. Like the fist of an angry god. I feel his hands about my neck. I feel him scratch and bite and tear at me, and all the time he keeps on screaming. Screaming as though the veil has been drawn back, and now he stares into something worse than death itself.

But I do not feel his hands on me. No more than I had felt the cold. I keep staring at that perfect circle of the amber firelight. It is as though I am somehow detached from everything. I watch the fire… and soon enough, my templar comes.

The light catches on the metal of his sword, and as he passes through the fire, the ice upon his armour melts and turns him into a thing poured out of liquid silver. The fire is like embers in his hair, and I see nothing behind the light as it catches in his eyes. It is like he is somehow detached from his body, from himself.

He falls upon our apprentice like a storm, like a wave of death itself that breaks in blood and thunder. He is an unbridled force of nature in that moment, and however wrong that it may be, I cannot help but find him beautiful.

 _I am in awe of him._

That awe changes into something else when he steps back from the butchered body of our apprentice, and cleans the blood off of his blade. I can see that hard, avian dispassion draining slowly out of him. I see the way the pain floods in to fill the empty space it leaves, and the way it draws those thin, dark lines upon his brow.

We shall do what we must, he and I. We are the last of an Order older than the stone and more important than life, or death, or any one of us. That Order must survive… no matter what it costs us. And no matter what it costs the children that we take in as our own.

As I turn away and wrap my naked, shaking body back up in the warm folds of my cloak, he is still watching the body of the man that trusted us enough to kneel before me. And, when I reach out to touch his gauntlet, he is still staring at the blade in his hand that hacked the life from him.

I squeeze his arm for a moment, then I turn and walk away.

That is his burden.

And he knows as well as I, that I must let him bear it.


End file.
